Some drawin' from today...

Wow! I haven't posted in a while. Sorry, Internet problems on my end....







Some 1 and 5 minute drawings from today's life drawing session. Was fun to experiment with shadow shapes!

So it seems that X-men 3 did well at the box office this weekend. Really well. Like, $120 million well. I had a chance to see this and the Da Vinci Code (which dropped 45% from its opening weekend earnings) and was not surprised at all. They sucked as hard as I thought they would. I suppose I should see Poseidon and Silent Hill to fully back up my gripe about the latest summer movies but I figure I've got more important things to do. At least Over the Hedge is doing well still, with only an 8% drop in earnings. Until June 9th, that is. Hehe.

It looks like Jim at Seward Street is officially closing down! Make sure to download the notes off his blog before he takes it down forever!

There's been some buzz on the net about the world premiere of Cars. Via [Luxo], "The movie was absolutely amazing. Definitely the best computer animated film of the year thus far, and the best in quite a while. [...] I will be back there on June 9th seeing it all over again."

Of course, he did also say this: "To be 100% honest, I did not find the story quite as appealing as the past couple of Pixar films, but that may just be me."

I can't wait either way.

Via the [TAG Blog], it seems that Dreamworks' next film is going to be called "Bee Movie" and will have something to do with Jerry Seinfeld. Strange that I've never heard of this? Also, I can't remember if I said anything about this when I posted about this year's Pixar visit, but I could've sworn that I heard Steve Hunter say that the next film after Ratatouille was a "Pete Docter Monster Film." Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I posted this before, but it seemed like a good thing to mention.

In this same post it seems that Flushed Away was being paused for it's own Meet-The-Robinsons style re-tooling, but is back in full production. It's good that Disney and Dreamworks are taking the effort to pause production and make these films better!

Also on the Tag Blog (that I just noticed), seems that Lasseter and Co. might be attempting to get rid of the infamous personal service contracts that Eisner and Co. instated. Here's a summation of exactly what this contract was:

"Disney animated features started raking in huge stacks of money, and Disney management decided to tie up animation talent. If you were a director, if you were an animator, you got offered a long-term employment contract with escalation clauses. You worked "exclusively" for Disney for three or five or seven years."

I don't usually talk about the business side of animation, but I've heard some bad things about the contracts at Disney in the past (such as the apparently-rumoured 'any drawing you do during your time working at Disney is property of Disney' rumour). Seems like a good thing to me.